If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Managua
Lane, Charles
IF IT'S TUESDAY THIS MUST BE MANAGUA by Charles Lane The writer as tourist in Nicaragua A quick trip into the heart of revolutionary Nicaragua has become something of a rite of passage for...
...Simon & Schuster, $18.95...
...intervention, the horrors of Somoismo, and the redemptive 1979 revolt—after which everything is "new...
...He and they share "some awareness...
...But he is no apologist...
...This resistance to democracy offers little comfort to the Reagan administration or its critics...
...We may well be dealing with a political culture that, quite apart from the impact of imported ideology, is resistant to democracy as Americans conceive it...
...Perhaps, Kinzer suggests, some officials are involved...
...If Rushdie had asked more questions, he might have found out that the land titles the FSLN grants to members of such co-ops are tightly restricted and do not confer the right to trade or subdivide ones "property...
...In contrast to his credulousness toward the Sandinistas, Rushdie counters every assertion Chamorro makes...
...leaders today, equips Davis to place the Sandinistas' rule in a broader historical context...
...Let's assume they do take Managua...
...Of course, the CIA never pretended that its backing was contingent on anything but anticommunism...
...There is ample evidence that the Sandinista Defense Committees, which control distribution of food rations, operate in just such .a manner...
...Congress has been known to shrink from such long-range commitments...
...She dismisses the FSLN's victory in the 1984 elections...
...For the administration, Nicaragua's antipluralist tradition makes it even harder to defend support for the contras as support for democracy...
...avarice or cold strategic calculation...
...As it did by declaring a Marine presence in Lebanon vital to our credibility throughout the Middle East, the administration has laid the rhetorical basis for its own— and the country's—humiliation in the event that its policy doesn't pan out...
...More Latin than Marxist, they could evolve into a relatively unrepressive one-party state along Mexican lines if left alone...
...I tried to imagine Reagan or Thatcher converting their national armies into instruments of the Republican or Conservative parties, just as the Nicaraguan army has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of the FSLN since 1979...
...Somoza dynasty in 1979, they took control of a people ambitious for independence from the United States but far more accustomed to dependence:' Some Nicaraguans figured the way to deal with their country's subordination was to make the best of it...
...Because the promise of democracy is key to retaining support, both sides find it hard to admit—in public at least—that almost any course the U.S...
...For the first time in my life...
...This study of Nicaragua's violent history, coupled with his questioning of the Sandinista...
...Maybe so, but that's hardly grounds for enthusiasm—or for outrage at the prospect that they might be overthrown...
...I took one of these "If it's Tuesday, this must be Matagalpa" tours of Nicaragua back in 1985...
...Small wonder that Davis finds Daniel Ortega's blunt rejection of American-style liberty— "your freedom, sir, is a monster" —as repellent as it is predictable...
...It's the only thing I miss...
...He, too, spent a good deal of time listening to—and, apparently, writing down*—the party line...
...Yet it has prescribed a means of winning that test that doesn't seem to match its diagnosis of the threat...
...Anyone outside those small but omnipotent forces was barely entitled to live, much less have an opinion...
...That could mean American troops...
...There were no concessions being made, the jewelry announced, to the spirit of the 'New Nicaragua...
...I tried to imagine Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher agreeing to submit themselves to a monthly grilling by members of the public, and failed," Rushdie writes...
...Beyond vague generalities about the installation of a new democratic order, the administration has said little about what would happen if the contras actually won...
...Rushdie sees Nicaragua through the lens of his own shallow presuppositions...
...But Rushdie doggedly ignores signs that the New Nicaragua is like the old one...
...Yet Rushdie goes on to smear Dona Violeta: her "treatment of me did not indicate a profound respect for the truth" The one aspect of Sandinista rule Rushdie does denounce is press censorship—it leaves him "depressed" Yet Rushdie's other remarks suggest that his concern for a free press reflects a rather shallow understanding of democratic politics...
...Contra fans continue to nurse the "Founding Fathers" illusion, despite well-documented reports of contra atrocities and a distinct lack of evidence that their leaders have in mind anything Americans would recognize as democracy...
...His new political travelogue*, is based on the usual pilgrimage: jet to Managua (via Havana), "briefings" with the Ministry of Culture, rum-andCoke by the pool at the Intercontinental Hotel, Jeep rides through the land-reformed countryside...
...The Marines often went to Nicaragua in response to appeals from one side or the other in that country's bloody nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury civil wars...
...If a co-op gets out of line, the state could cut off its power, water, and health care, and reduce its access to markets...
...The administration has hyped the stakes, declaring Nicaragua almost a do-or-die test case of American assertiveness in the world...
...He notes that there aren't any decent toys in shortage-stricken Nicaraguan shops...
...In London, Rushdie belonged to a "Nicaraguan Solidarity Campaign" out of a "deeper affinity with that small country in a continent [sic] (Central America) upon which I had never set foot" A child of India's revolt against the British raj, he felt naturally sympathetic with the Nicaraguans...
...Even in the administration's best-case scenario, our troubles would be far from over...
...of how it felt to be there on the bottom looking up at the descending heel!' This was tempered by just enough doubt to make the trip necessary: "I was familiar with the tendency of revolutions to go wrong . . . . I knew about starting with idealism and romance and ending up with betrayed expectations !' But Rushdie needn't have worried...
...This irony passes unexplained and unremarked...
...Chaos as context Peter Davis, the leftish maker of the antiVietnam war documentary, "Hearts and Minds," made a Nicaragua pilgrimage, too—in December, 1983, and briefly in 1986, so much of his material isn't fresh...
...This helps explain how both supporters and critics of the Reagan administration's Nicaraguan policy can offer such unlikely and mutually exclusive visions of that country and its future...
...He is sympathetic to the idea of revolution...
...But the current course has its costs, too...
...Intellectuals and policymakers in the North can still enjoy their illusions on the cheap...
...Furthermore, Davis points out that American intervention was the product of more than just U.S...
...They are a product not only of foreign ideologies and domestic nationalism, but also of a distinct political culture that has never contained much room for pluralism: What Nicaragua lacks most in its political life is a tradition of comity, the sense of civility between those who disagree with each other, an opportunity for those out of power to gain it by a peaceful expression of the popular will rather than by shooting their way in...
...Peter Davis...
...Hyping toward humiliation Davis grasps an underappreciated point about the nature of Nicaraguan politics...
...The only person Rushdie vigorously crossexamines is Violeta de Chamorro, the widow of Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, the editor of La Prensa, whose assassination (allegedly by Somoza agents) helped spark the 1978-79 insurrection...
...After three weeks in the country in July, 1986, he was content...
...The rebels' fractiousness and authoritarian tendencies may be beyond the capacity of outsiders to remedy...
...One conclusion, formed after watching Interior Minister Tomas Borge lording it over the diners at a fancy downtown restaurant: "Managua . . . presented an opportunity to observe the dirty little secret of revolution—that revolutionaries on winning power become precisely what they claim to abhor, an elite class ?' Davis did his historical homework...
...IF IT'S TUESDAY THIS MUST BE MANAGUA by Charles Lane The writer as tourist in Nicaragua A quick trip into the heart of revolutionary Nicaragua has become something of a rite of passage for the literate left these days...
...Nicaragua was born in the collective harshness of a militarized colonialism, the landed Spanish oligarchy, and the Catholic hierarchy that emerged from the inquisition...
...Nor does Rushdie wonder why, despite the Sandinista's claims of mass adherence to their liberation theology-oriented Popular Church (claims which he accepts), posters of Pope John Paul II and conservative dissident Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo were "everywhere" in the shops and cafes of Managua...
...To Rushdie, and to the Sandinistas, Nicaraguan history is a fable: U.S...
...Nor that Ortega's wife, Rosario Murillo, muses wistfully on the pleasures of New York City: "Oh yes...
...But my strongest impression was that such a short, casual visit, much of which was unavoidably spent in the company of eager Sandinista flacks, contained enough visual and anecdotal material to support any case I might have Charles Lane is an associate editor of The New Republic...
...he calls the vote "the fairest ever seen in Latin America...
...The novelist describes cooperatives where, he was told, land is "owned and farmed by individuals and the government's role was limited to supplying them with power, water, health care, and distributing facilities" There...
...After eight days I came home with some dandy souvenirs and a rough sense that, on the spectrum of Marxist tyrannies stretching from Pol Pot's Cambodia to Tito's Yugoslavia, Nicaragua fits somewhere in the middle, on the mild side of Cuba...
...There would undoubtedly be years of guerrilla war after that, as Sandinista die-hards retreated to the very hills from which the contras are attacking now...
...Rather, "when the Sandinistas finally overthrew the *Where is Nicaragua...
...Rushdie writes: "The first thing I noticed about Chamorro was that she wore a great deal of jewelry...
...Attractive as it is in theory, however, the costs, both economic and military, of bolstering other Central American governments against the destabilizing influence of a permanent Marxist presence in their midst would probably run into the billions...
...I failed...
...takes in Nicaragua will probably yield ugly results...
...I had come across a government I could support, not faute de mieux, but because I wanted its efforts (at survival, at building the nation, and at transforming it) to succeed!' The Sandinistas, he writes, are "men of integrity and pragmatism ." How does he know...
...And we would shore up neighboring regimes to prevent the Nicaraguan revolution from repeating itself...
...Critics of administration policy who take the strategic issues seriously usually advocate an alternative something like the following: an agreement with the Sandinistas that grants them the right to live in a contra-free environment, but satisfies our worries about Cuban advisers and Soviet missiles...
...He visits a "Face the People" meeting, one of an occasional series in which Daniel Ortega or another Davis realized that Managua "presented an opportunity to observe the dirty little secret of revolution—that revolutionaries on winning power become precisely what they claim to abhor, an elite class . " commandante goes to a village, gives a speech, and answers questions from the audience...
...Proof of Sandinista flexibility...
...As heiress to La Prensa, which the Sandinistas closed after censoring it for months, Violeta de Chamorro is now a leader of the domestic opposition...
...He has made little effort to grasp the history or political culture of the place, both of which influence the course of its political and economic development...
...On a purely practical level, this also means that one factor that reduces the contras' chances of winning is that they can't offer an attractive alternative to a large enough portion of the Nicaraguan people...
...Davis, however, is attuned to the historical patterns in the Nicaraguan predicament, one of which is that Nicaraguans haven't necessarily viewed independence quite as longingly as the Sandinistas imagine...
...To ignore such factors is a kind of insult to the very people he claims to support: it is not taking them seriously enough to study them...
...Nor does he find it odd that Ortega can chat about food shortages in his country as his guests consume turtle meat and other delicacies...
...ruption, mismanagement, and waste, and has spawned a thriving black market the government can't control...
...He asked them...
...Chronic chaos in Nicaragua was a precondition, too...
...Sandinista fans pretend that the United States has no legitimate strategic interest in Nicaragua or anywhere else in Central America, and that our meddling is the source of all that country's economic woes, pro-Soviet leanings, and political oppression...
...Davis wrestles with the implications, ultimately concluding that, dictatorial as they are, the Sandinistas still retain at least a kernel of idealistic concern for the development of their nation...
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...In any case, as Stephen Kinzer of The New York Times recently reported, the Sandinistas' staterun farm marketing network is riddled with cor*The Jaguar's Smite: A Nicaraguan Journey...
...No state-farm dogma here...
...And couldn't such cooperatives allow for plenty of state control...
...If we would just quit fighting it, the revolution would resume the business of securing freedom, independence, and social welfare for the Nicaraguan people...
...For their counterparts on the right, it's a few days in a contra rebel base...
...wanted to make about the place...
...Small instances tell...
...Just 24 pages earlier, in President Daniel Ortega's home, "Children's toys . . . were everywhere...
...At a minimum it would require large amounts of military .aid to the contra government—not to mention the huge infusion of economic aid it would take to rebuild and maintain the Nicaraguan economy...
...Whatever the Sandinistas say, we would reserve the right to punish violations of such an agreement through the use of our own military force...
...Salman Rushdie...
...His preposterous statement ignores elections in democratic Costa Rica, or, for that matter, dozens of other much fairer elections that have taken place throughout Latin history from Santo Domingo to Santiago...
...And not just $100 million a year to arm the rebels or bad publicity around the world every time the contras bomb a clinic...
...Turtle meat heroes The acclaimed author of Midnight's Children and two other novels, Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay and now lives in London...
...Pluralism and human rights were mainly of concern to the State Department...
...Why trade in one group of dictators for another...
...A teacher asks him: "Why don't the Sandiistas behave better, to get economic aid from the United States...
...What else could you expect from someone who is both a Nicaraguan and a Marxist...
...For now, though, the costs of the revolution and the war continue to be borne mainly by Nicaraguans: contras, Sandinistas, and caughtinthe-middle types alike...
...While the country was being governed alternately by its old Liberal and Conservative parties, elections were frequently held but real power was traded at gunpoint...
...As Davis finds, this attitude still turns up in the comments of Nicaraguans today...
...The wonderful yoghurt...
Vol. 19 • June 1987 • No. 5
